Monthly Archives: January 2013

The problem with religion in politics is this: You have pastors nationwide preaching things from the pulpit that aren’t necessarily true about politics. And they have congregations who blindly eat up anything they say. They accept what they say as “gospel truth” no matter what. Rarely do they look up the things they are told. They trust their pastors. So if their Pastors say, during the reign of Emperor George II, that the war in Iraq was caused by the god of the Bible to get the Gospel into that area (like was said by a former Pastor of mine to us one morning), or if some Right-wing nutcase Pastor says that Obamacare is going to exterminate the elderly (http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/klingenschmitt-obamacare-will-exterminate-elderly-systematically), they blindly accept it!

This is dangerous! That’s why the Founding Fathers created America to be a secular Republic and not a Christian theocracy. They had just fled a country, England, that had a state-sponsored religion. This is why they promoted a Separation of Church and State, a phrase coined by Thomas Jefferson in a letter in 1802. This is why the US Senate ratified the Treaty of Tripoli which states “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion” unanimously in 1797. This is why there is no mention of God, Jesus, Christianity, or the Bible in the Constitution. This is why we have a secular Constitution and not merely the Bible as our Constitution.

They founded America as a place where people can have the freedom to practice religion or not practice it. But that’s also why it was intended by them for religion to be separate from government. Religion was to be a private matter.

This is why “under god” was not included in the original pledge of allegiance. This is why “In god we trust” was not originally on our curency. This is why “In god we trust” was not our original national motto; it was “E. pluribus unum (out of many, one).” The original intent for this country was a melting pot, a unified plurality. Not a Christian theocracy.